


rearrange to let you in

by surreptitiously



Category: Scholomance - Naomi Novik
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:27:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28138398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surreptitiously/pseuds/surreptitiously
Summary: In which monsters are fought, senior seminars are attended, mirrors are doors, the school is haunted, and history gets realer than anyone could have expected.
Relationships: Aadhya & Galadriel "El" & Yi Liu, Galadriel "El"/Orion Lake
Comments: 19
Kudos: 104
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	rearrange to let you in

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Macdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macdragon/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide Macdragon! I hope you like this -- I took your prompts and ran with them, a bit, but I hope you can recognise them in this. 
> 
> And thank you to middlecyclone, my fave, for reading this and gently steering me off the path of narrative developments that would have made this a) twice as long b) twice as dark. Truly, nobody wanted that.
> 
> I've tried to be as faithful to the worldbuilding of the Scholomance as possible but I just know that there are going to be elements of this that are contradicted by a throwaway line of El's in canon. So if there's anything I've forgotten to take into account, please just assume for my sake that this is a canon divergent AU in those respects.

A week after graduation, the new senior class at the Scholomance began specialist seminars.

You had your pick of three, along with your regular classes, and I’d had mine chosen since freshman year. I would be taking Advanced Transformation Spells (which counted towards both artifice and incantations track, so Aadhya would be taking it with me), Defence and Protection (the one class I’d promised my mum that I’d take), and (the only slot left that would fit, particularly after I wound up on the honours track), History of Arcane Magics. 

This last was less obviously useful, but I wasn’t too annoyed about the vagaries of the senior schedule. Obviously the point of Arcane Magics was that they were arcane, and nobody really understood them, so I didn’t know much about what to expect going in, but there was always potential for picking up a few little-known handy spells from the annals of history. This year, I'd need everything I could get my hands on.

It was the only seminar I was taking that was entirely coursework based. The rumour was that whatever you chose to study, the reading list would actually help you, though I wasn’t sure why, and distrusted anything that seemed too easy.

But still: it was the only slot that would fit, and it didn’t hurt to be prepared, so the morning of the first seminar, I spent all breakfast thinking about what would be the most useful project.

Ancient history felt like my best chance at turning up something truly useful; Sumerian magic, or Mesoamerican. But then again, Ancient Greece was overdone for a reason, and Latin would come in handy.

Dimly, I was aware that I wasn't being a delightful breakfast companion, not that that's ever been a particular dream of mine. I barely even registered the slight commotion when something erupted out of the porridge. 

"Hmm," I said, a moment later, when Aadhya asked me something, staring off into the distance as someone pulled the chair next to mine out.

Ancient Greek - or maybe the less obvious option would be to look closer to home. It was a common fallacy that 'arcane' meant 'old', and there were plenty of modern Welsh magics that nobody really paid much attention to, assuming as most people did that Welsh magic meant Gwen Higgins in a field - 

"El," Aadhya said again, sounding amused. "I said, what's your first class?"

"Oh," I said. "I've got a History seminar."

"Same," said Liu, unnecessarily, but with genuine enthusiasm. She was looking over at the queue, keeping an eye on her small cousins, who appeared to be fighting over the toast. "We can go together, El."

The occupant of the seat on my other side cleared his throat. "Er, me too."

Wait. 

I swiveled around. "But you're not in honours track," I accused. 

"It was the only one that fit," Orion said. "I had extra credit, or whatever."

 _Now_ I was cursing the vagaries of the senior schedule. "You don't even need history to graduate!"

Orion shrugged. "Hey, do you have any salt?"

"And for the nineteenth time, that's disgusting," I muttered, handing over the extra sachet of salt I'd picked up and watching him desecrate a perfectly mediocre bowl of porridge with it. 

I was distracted by a sudden kick at my ankle. I jumped and looked up into Aadhya's knowing face. She raised an eyebrow at me. I tried desperately to keep a straight face, but it must have done something revolting despite myself, because her lips twitched.

Alright, so the thought of Arcane Magics was more appealing than giving more thought to my suddenly-complex personal life. I could have coped with either the unexpected admission by Orion Lake that he had apparently been ineffectually attempting to date me for several weeks, or I could have coped with the note from my mother, the first contact I’ve had with her in three years, warning me away from him. But both in one day was too much to reckon with; particularly when you took the added unknown of what I felt about it all into account. I couldn’t solve that equation, and the thought of trying gave me a headache.

"Well, it's good we can all walk together," Liu said practically, as her infant relations sat down beside her. "The classes are going to be tiny as it is. We're lucky to have each other."

 _Lucky to have Orion_ , she didn't say, kindly, but I thought it anyway, stabbing sourly at my burnt eggs.

"I've got Enchanted Objects," Aadhya said. "The only person I know going is Ibrahim."

Even I could muster a sympathetic grimace at that. 

“Actually, El,” she said. “I think we get to choose our own assignments. Can I have your mirror? I want to try and uncurse it. It should get me a higher grade to transform an existing enchantment, especially one that - didn’t quite go as planned - than to come up with a new one. Anyone can do that. Plus, it would be useful if it stopped whispering horrible little nothings at you.”

I thought about it; I would need to think of something good to give her in return, or might just have to give up the mirror itself. But being in an alliance gave you the time you needed to figure that kind of thing out. And it _would_ be good if it stopped whispering horrible little nothings while I was trying to brush my teeth.

“Sure,” I said. “We can go and get it before class starts.”

“I hope we get to pick our projects,” Liu said. “I think I’d like to learn more about architectural magics."

I glanced at her cousins, peacefully bickering to themselves as they ate their toast, and remembered that Liu's family were building towards creating their own enclave. We rarely talked about our plans after graduation; it felt too much like tempting fate. But it was interesting to know that Liu was still planning on joining them, even after giving up malia - or, at least, had left that path open. I supposed that you might overlook things that were unpleasant or inconvenient if it was for your family.

Involuntarily, I thought again of the note from Mum, and shook my head slightly, trying to get rid of it. It wasn't any use dwelling on it.

“Shall we go now, Aadhya?” I said, attempting to sound brisk, and gathering my things. “We can meet you back here and head down together; there’s plenty of time. I think all the seminar rooms are next to each other, you don’t need to be subjected to Ibrahim.”

“Sure,” she said. At the same moment, Orion scrambled up.

“What,” I said. 

“I need to get a pen from my room,” he said, adding, “Only if that’s _fine_ with you,” in exaggerated tones, as though sarcasm was something he was new to and not very good at yet. Unlike most other things. It was a bad look on him.

“What about Liu?” I said.

“You go ahead,” said Liu. “I’ll meet you outside in ten. I promised my aunt I’d make sure these two ate something other than toast.”

The infant cousins looked up, warily. Orion shrugged at me.

“Fine,” I said rudely, and we left.

* * *

Mercifully, Aadhya realised that I wasn't in the mood to make small talk with Orion, so she asked him to watch our backs as we walked. And it was a good thing she did, too, because no sooner had we left the cafeteria than a creepworm emerged from a rare unsealed vent and tried to drag him into the murky depths of the school's ventilation system, which was to say, into Hell.

Somehow it caught him at an unguarded moment, and it was almost funny when we turned around to see him flat on the floor with the most startled expression on his face, being dragged backwards by his feet. In fact, there was really no 'almost' about it; it was hilarious. If it had happened to another student, it would be tragic, of course, but it only took Orion half a second to recover, twist around, and bark out a banishing spell at it, causing it to untangle its fangs from the remnants of his trainers in shock. Then he followed it up with a fire spell that shrivelled it instantly into dust. This all in the space of about a minute.

“That one almost got you, Lake,” Aadhya commented, as he scrambled to his feet, looking harassed. “That would have been an embarrassing way to go, after everything you’ve done.”

“I had it under control,” he said. His shoes and socks were in tatters. He made a face and abandoned them there, wincing a little at the cold stone below his feet.

I rolled my eyes. “Come on, we’ll be late.”

When we’d been assigned our senior dorms, I had the feeling that the school would rather have placed us on different floors altogether, but even despite Orion’s heroics, there simply weren’t enough seniors left for us all to be too far away from each other. So my room was a few down from Liu’s, who was a few away from Aadhya, and Orion was opposite her, next to the staircase.

We stopped outside Orion’s room first, but he insisted we go ahead without waiting. Which, I supposed, was his funeral, though it would be appalling luck even for him if a mal tried to kill him twice in the space of ten minutes. Aadhya and I went to wrestle down my mirror, which, though not large, was an inconvenient burden because the silver frame had developed a tendency to melt into little tendrils of tentacle that tried to grab your hands. 

"Orion is losing his edge," I said, in the spirit of making conversation as we pulled off the cover. "He was supposed to be watching our backs."

"Maybe he was," said Aadhya. The mirror said, “ _Galadriel, scorcher of earth and bringer of destruction, darkness calls on you -”_

“Oh, shut up,” I muttered, and batted away a tentacle. "What?"

Aadhya grinned, and looked down pointedly, at -

I stared at her, appalled.

"I'm just saying!" she said. "You do a lot of squats!"

" _\- wreak havoc among your enemies and seek vengeance upon those - "_

"Suddenly that mirror sounds like it's speaking sense," I said.

"He was probably thinking about lunch or something," said Aadhya hastily, though she was still smiling faintly. 

"We _just_ had breakfast," I said, venting my irritation through waving a hand at the mirror. Slowly, it froze over, turning a dull black; a tentacle got stuck half an inch away from where it had been trying to sneak into my hair. 

A spell to freeze an army in its tracks, Soviet-made; in this form, it didn't take much mana, though it was still a waste of what little it did. Anyway, I felt better.

“Are you done?” Orion said, appearing in the doorframe. He was wearing no socks, but he did have a new pair of shoes. Of course he had a second pair of shoes, and saw nothing wrong with going barefoot in trainers. Yet another sign that his mind had been forever warped by being the most special boy to ever live. “We should head back.”

Aadhya looked at me meaningfully, but by then I’d busied myself with lifting the mirror off its hook. 

“What do you think it’ll be for lunch, then, Orion?” she said, casually, leaning against the wall.

“Cottage pie,” he said promptly. “It’s always cottage pie on a Monday.”

Refusing to look at either of them, I hefted the mirror over my shoulder and marched out.

We met Liu outside the canteen, deposited the children in their Intro to Maleficaria seminar, and walked down to the seminar rooms. I’d never been in one before, having only been to the bottom level to go to the workshop. You tended to go straight in and straight back out again, no poking around. 

With all the detouring we'd done, it was no surprise that by the time we got to class, we were slightly late. Aadhya was in the room next to ours. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her standing outside the closed door, eyeing it with the same sense of trepidation that I was feeling. Then I steeled myself, and pushed it open. 

It was just a regular seminar room. I felt my shoulders relax, though not all the way. There were ten desks, neatly laid out, and some rather sparse bookshelves on the walls, that had a sort of long-sufferingly enduring look to them. Of course, there were no windows, just a flickering overhead light that washed the room with a clinical white brightness. 

There were a couple of people in there already, and obviously they'd claimed the good seats at the back. Their faces dropped as they saw me walk in, but brightened right back up at the sight of Orion behind me, which was just typical. I didn't know them well, though I was fairly sure that the two girls, Hannah and Lucy, were from the Melbourne enclave and the boy, Jacob, was from the Victoria offshoot. 

"There's a seat over here, if you want," he said hopefully, gesturing in front of him. 

"Oh, thank you," I said, smiling falsely and brightly, flouncing over to sit there myself. Behind me, Orion snorted. 

"Is anyone else coming, do you know?" Liu asked one of the girls. 

"No idea," she said.

As we took our seats, there was a sudden commotion at the door, and Aadhya came rushing in, my mirror under her arm. 

"Mal next door," she said. "Everyone already ran - the fuckers. I've trapped it there. Mind if I crash?"

"Spare me," I said to Orion as he began to rise. "Look, get it after class, can't you? It'll keep. We're already late."

"What is it, Aadhya?" Liu said, with interest. 

"I think it's a spiritsucker," she said, and bit her lip, looking at Orion.

As, to be fair, did the rest of us, even me. It was a particularly nasty mal, one I'd never seen in the school before, beyond one particularly memorable Maleficaria Studies lecture. It was not physically huge, but it had deadly stingers all over its body, which paralysed you very conveniently for eating. But what made it particularly nasty was the fact that it had a limited ability to draw its own malia, and it knew how to use it. The rumour was, and there was no way of verifying it, that before you found yourself getting devoured from the feet up, it stole your soul. 

I personally didn't believe it; the thought of watching my own arm be digested was quite enough of a deterrent for me. But I could imagine that a person with a hero complex - one who actually cared, greatly and personally, about the horrible things that might happen to other people, to the point of unreasonableness - might feel differently. 

"It won't get out," Aadhya said hastily, seeing the look on Orion's face. "I've melted the door closed. I promise, it's stuck there."

Orion looked mutinous, but in the end it didn't matter, because before he could get up, the door to our own room slammed shut. 

In the silence that followed, we heard the distinctive click of a lock.

"What the fuck," I said, and then there were a few confused moments as everyone rushed towards the door together. We each tried it, like it would make a difference if it was Hannah pushing instead of me - though Hannah probably thought just that. Then after it was established that the door was well and truly locked, we stood back, staring at it.

"It's that mal," Orion said surely, as Liu attempted a complex little unlocking charm. When it didn't work, he made a noise of frustration and hurled a blasting spell at the door. It didn't give; he cast another, even more powerful. I could feel the shockwaves ripple through the air.

"Stop that," I said sharply. "I mean, drain the power banks of the entire New York enclave if you want, it's no skin off my nose, but it's not helping us get out."

"I'm sure it's not the mal," Aadhya said. "Why would it lock us in?"

I didn't particularly want to speculate. Orion had begun to pace around the perimeter of the room.

"If it wasn't the mal, what else could it have been?" said Lucy, the other Melbourne girl. She was looking at Aadhya with suspicion, and I bristled.

"If you think it was us -" I began hotly, at the same moment as Orion said, "Look at this.”

I broke off. He’d stopped pacing, and was standing by one of the desks. When we all looked over at him, he waved a piece of paper at us. "Worksheet. This wasn't here before, right?"

We each had one, except for Aadhya, who sat backwards in a spare chair, watching us all with ikeen interest. It read:

_HISTORY OF ARCANE MAGICS: WEEK ONE: ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCANE_

“Oh,” said Liu, sounding pleased.

_This is a practical, case study led workshop on the ontology, epistemology, and historiography of hidden or obscure magics. Each seminar will tackle aspects of the arcane nominated by students and will count for 10% of your final grade. There are no reading lists. This is a project-based course. You will be assessed during each seminar. Additionally, during your final seminar, you will sit an exam that will account for the remaining 30% of your final grade._

Below that was an essay question: _Write 1000 words on the construction of the Scholomance_. 

“I need a book about the Scholomance,” said Hannah, quickly, to the air.

Nothing happened.

“I need a book on architecture magic?” she tried.

“Maybe we’re supposed to use the books on the shelves,” said Liu, looking around, though without much hope.

“How are we supposed to do this worksheet if we can’t learn the magic for it?” said Jacob, sounding frustrated.

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, thinking hard. Though the Scholomance was broken and rusty, though its magic worked against yours more often and not, I’d never heard of a class that simply didn’t work. There was something we were missing.

Opening them again, I looked around. There was the door, peacefully shut. There was the light, the paved floor, the whitewashed walls. The bookshelves - I looked more closely at the books, but they appeared to be a mix of intro-level textbooks and mundane paperbacks, nothing useful there. 

Then there were the desks, set out like they always were, two empty and seven filled. The Australasian enclavers had their heads bent together, whispering over something. Liu was still examining the shelves. Orion met my gaze, unexpectedly, and raised his eyebrows at me. I shrugged, and turned forwards, looking at Aadhya, sitting at the desk next to the door, who didn’t appear particularly bothered. Not that she would be - she was missing her class, anyway, whether she was missing it down here or somewhere else. I understood why she hadn’t gone straight back up. I wouldn’t have wanted to, by myself, either, especially not with a great big mirror to hulk around - 

I blinked. Somewhere in the deep and dim recesses of my brain, something had clicked; I’d seen something. It took me a second to realise what it was, looking back around at the shelves in case it was a book I’d registered, at each of us, Hannah, Lucy, Jacob, Liu, Orion, frowning now, Aadhya, and at Aadhya’s feet was the mirror, resting against a desk leg.

There was something reflected in it.

I jumped out of my seat.

“What is it, El?” said Aadhya. I scrambled over with less dignity than I would have liked, and picked the mirror up. It was still frozen and dull, the glass dark, but if you tilted it in the right direction…

“There’s a door,” I said. 

“Well, yeah,” said Hannah. “We can’t open it.”

“No, another door, idiot,” I said. “Look - in the mirror.”

Mirror magic was an unstable, experimental, and very, very, old field of magic. It was a common misconception that only maleficers used it, because most people thought that the other side of the mirror was a twisted version of our world. Which was ridiculous, for the most part. Malia was defined by the intent to do magic without first paying the cost; it had nothing to do with the magic itself.

But still, it was true that there was plenty about mirror magic that nobody fully understood, and like with most things, magic that was unknown was automatically distrusted. Like how you might see something in a mirror that had no counterpart in reality. Or that was hidden.

"Orion, can you try - or Liu -"

"I can do it," Orion said. Attempting to angle the mirror and look in it and direct him at the same time turned out to be a protracted business, but eventually, we got there: me holding the mirror slightly above my shoulders, a door identical and diametrically opposite to the one we'd come in reflected in it, and Orion with his hand on the handle.

It clicked open without any trouble. Everyone was hovering near Orion now, and eyeing the mirror. I craned my neck, trying to see what lay beyond the door, but the angle wasn't right. All I could see was darkness. 

"You're not seriously going through there, are you?" said Jacob. He and the two Australians were huddled close together, shoulders squared like they thought we were going to attack them.

"What, are you going to stay here?" I said.

"I mean, won't the door just open when the hour is up?" said Hannah. "We must have been here at least half an hour already."

"I'm going through," said Liu, unexpectedly. "This is what I wanted to learn. I'm here to learn. It won't happen if I just sit here."

"It's _mirror magic_ ," said Lucy. "That door isn't on the blueprints. Our enclave doesn't mess with that kind of thing; we're here to stay alive."

In other words, we were a bunch of freaks and were probably spiriting Orion away to do dark magic on him like the weird desperate indie kids we were. 

"Fine," I said. "I'm going with Liu. I'm not going to just sit here and flunk out. Anyone else can do what they like."

"I'm coming too," said Orion immediately, as I'd known he would. I had the feeling Orion had never sat quietly in a room in his life.

"We're staying," said Hannah, looking unhappy that Orion wouldn't be around to be their personal bodyguard. Well, sucked to be Hannah.

I turned to Aadhya. "You obviously don't have to," I said. "But will you be okay here?"

"Are you kidding? I'm coming with you," she said.

I blinked at her. "Really?"

"Obviously," she said, and smiled at me, and at Liu on her right. "I prefer the company."

I still wasn't used to this. My whole life, I'd always been the kid who had to pair up with the teacher when we walked to swimming lessons as a class. It kept surprising me, realising that this was what being in an alliance was - this feeling, pleased and warm in the pit of my stomach. 

She rolled her eyes at me. "Don't get soppy on me now, El," she said. "Let's go."

So without further ado, we went. 

* * *

Orion went first, of course. The downside of this was that he was tall and I therefore could not see past him to what was actually on the other side of the door, even when I was halfway through it myself.

But once I was fully through, I realised it wouldn't matter, anyway. The door clicked shut behind us and we were left in the dark.

I thought uneasily about the crystal hanging against my sternum for half a second - I'd had the foresight to bring a full one, even though I'd used a bit of it already, but I'd learned that it was never a guarantee that a full crystal would last long. Especially when, for all my talk, I really had no idea what I was getting into. 

Then Aadhya clicked something, and an eerie pale light flooded the hallway. I glanced over at her, and she smiled nervously back. The light was coming from a ring on her hand that I hadn't seen before.

"Anglersquid," she said, by way of explanation. "I just traded with a freshman for it last week."

As far as I could tell, we were in a short, dark corridor, with another door at the end. It was still too dim to see much more than that, but I glanced quickly in the mirror anyway. There were no other doors in it, but the walls were covered in a silvery script that I couldn't decipher.

By then, the others had started to move forwards, so I gave up on trying and followed suit. 

As we progressed down the hall, something weird started to happen. At first, I put it down to some kind of perspective shift caused by the bad light, but -

"Is it me," Aadhya said. "Or are the walls -"

"Closing in," I finished grimly. "Orion, get off my foot."

"I'm _trying_ ," Orion said. He was bent slightly awkwardly over to fit his big head under the ceiling. It wasn't that the walls were moving towards us, thank god; rather that they were tapering, as though we were walking into the vanishing point of a painted horizon. Either way, we were well and truly squashed.

“Is anyone else starting to feel a bit less relaxed about this?” said Aadhya. 

“Come on,” said Orion, through gritted teeth, jiggling the door handle. I couldn’t tell very well, with my face basically planted in his back and Liu’s hair in my mouth and Aadhya’s elbow jutting uncomfortably into my hip, but it looked like it might be rusted. 

“If you break that door handle off, Orion, I’ll kill you myself,” I said, muffled.

“Why did it send us here if it won’t let us in?” said Liu, reprovingly, to the air, which took on a distinctly shifty feel. The school loved to be contrary; at least, the school we knew did. I tried not to think about the fact that we weren’t anywhere on the blueprints anymore.

Suddenly, with a creak like a put-upon sigh, the door gave way, and we tumbled through gracelessly, one by one. It took a few seconds to disentangle from each other and silently agree we would never speak of it again. 

We were in a small atrium - though the word was more than it really deserved. It was more of a glorified entryway, no bigger than a walk-in closet, but made interesting by the fact that it was pentagonal, and that each of the walls had an identical door set into it. 

Being careful to have my back squarely to the door we came in through, I went up to one. It looked weirdly familiar: it was a dark, dark grey and had five panels, four small vertical ones arranged neatly like bricks in a wall at the bottom and one horizontal at the top. In between was an ornate doorknob, and below that, in small engraved letters, it read: ADMITS ONE. 

The others had done the same as me. "Where have I seen this before?" Aadhya said.

It was Orion who answered. "It's the same as the door that fetched us here. For induction."

He was right. I could remember it so clearly; we'd been expecting it, of course, but that didn't mean it wasn't a surprise to see a great bloody door emerge in the middle of our yurt. Mum had gasped, and I'd clenched my fist over the handle of my ratty bag, so hard I could still see the imprint of the fabric on my skin later, in the cafeteria. 

It wasn't any less of a surprise now. At the time, I hadn't paid much notice to the instructions. I thought they were a message for any keen beans who wanted to pack all their kids off together to avoid having to deal with another year of mal attacks. But in the commune, it was only me, after all. 

Now, though. 

"Well," said Liu. "Do we split up?"

"Or go back," I said, still staring at the door. 

"I don't think so," said Aadhya. I turned to look at her, then followed her gaze back the way we'd come. There was now, conspicuously, no door. 

Suddenly, the room felt even smaller, the air in it dense and heavy and _present_ , as though the particles in it were drawing together, coalescing into an atmosphere with its own dull and malicious sentience.

“Fuck,” I said, with feeling.

“Check your mirror, El,” Liu said, sensibly. “If we came in through a mirror, sort of, we’ll have to go out through one, too.”

I could see the logic in this; the only sure thing about mirror magic was that it operated with a kind of symmetry. But the door had vanished, in every dimension we had access to.

“We’ll just have to go through,” I said, aiming for businesslike. “You’re right, Liu. If there’s a way in, there’ll be a way out.” 

“I could try and explode a hole in the wall,” Orion said hopefully.

“Oh, because that worked so well last time,” I said. “Look, we’re going to have to do it. Unless you can think of literally any other option.”

Truthfully, the longer that we stayed in the entryway, the more uncomfortable I felt. Though I was all too aware that there was no other way in, I couldn’t help but feel… _watched_.

“Here you go, El,” said Aadhya, who’d been angling my mirror at all the corners of the room. “There’s nothing.”

“I gave it to you,” I said. 

“I _borrowed_ it,” she said, thrusting it at me.

“This isn’t even your class, Aadhya,” I said. She looked stubborn.

It took me a second to understand why she was putting such a fine point on it, but then I cottoned on. If the mirror had been our way in, it would be our way back out, too. Whichever of us took it, it would be a debt, and a big one. I didn’t want to owe her that much, or be owed; it would be death for our alliance. 

Maybe I could give it to Liu? Orion wouldn’t take it - though Liu probably wouldn’t, either. It wouldn’t be fair for any one of us to have it, really, when it might be useful to all of us - 

“Can you hear that?” Liu said, suddenly, one hand on her door.

I stopped thinking, or tried to, and listened. 

There were voices, very quiet. Or, I realised as I listened, just one voice, singing a spell. It tugged at some long buried memory in the back of my mind, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise. 

“Is it a mal?” said Aadhya. 

“It’s like the voices in the language booths,” Liu said. “I don’t think _they’re_ mals. But still -”

I agreed with her; I didn’t want to stick around much longer, even if it was just the school. I could feel the voice worming its way into my consciousness, despite me trying not to pay much attention to it. 

Then, suddenly, there was a spell in my mind. It took me a second to recognise it, as a nasty little spell that some medieval torturer had come up with to hang, draw, and quarter without any of the mess, but it would do, with a little modification, as a solution. It would take a lot of power, but I began to think that it would be worth it, just to get away from that persistent little voice, that feeling of being surveilled.

I laid the mirror on the floor.

“What are you doing?” said Orion. “El?”

“Give me a minute,” I told them. “Then let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I took a deep breath, then knelt, and closed my eyes. I hadn’t had a chance to think the whole spell through, and reciting it was like trying to sing a song I’d only heard once, but I didn’t dare worry about it. It felt like a miracle when, a few minutes later, I opened my eyes and there the mirror was - neatly carved into four pieces.

“There,” I said. My head lurched as I stood up. I didn’t particularly want to check my crystal to see how much of it I’d used up. “Now, let’s go.”

The others were staring at me. “ _Go_ ,” I said, impatiently. 

One by one, we picked up our mirrors. “See you on the other side?” said Liu.

“You’d better,” Aadhya said.

“We’ll be out in half an hour,” I said. 

“I hope so,” Orion said, but if he followed it up with anything else, I didn’t hear, because I’d stepped through the door.

* * *

After that whispery singing, the sudden silence rang in my ears. Once again, I’d been plunged into darkness, though there was something different about the quality of the dark here, compared to the tunnel. It was a very _present_ darkness, the kind that I’d normally be certain had at least a few mals hiding in it somewhere.

I cast one of Mum’s candlelight spells immediately, I wasn’t an idiot, though I was cursing myself for expending so much mana on the quartering spell earlier. I was still feeling a bit shaky, and the light flickered dramatically where it was cupped in my hands, before stabilising into a wavering but steady glow.

I was in a bedroom, though it didn’t look much like any bedroom I’d seen in the Scholomance before. My room had always been sparse, and while that was partly my own choice – I’d never seen the point in making it look pretty, and anyway I’d never had anything to make it pretty with – it was also that the school didn’t really give you much to work with in the first place. A twin-sized bed, a wardrobe, a desk, tiled floor: that was it.

This room was different. The bed was in the middle, not shoved into one corner, and it was hardly the same as my hard little bed with its one pillow and meagre blanket. It was a _four-poster_ , with red drapes hanging from each side and heavy-looking sheets, and four plump cushions at its head. I didn't know who in their right mind would sleep in it, though. It was practically a red carpet for mals. 

The walls were all dark and worryingly damp with some unknown substance, and I was careful not to look too closely at any of the shadowy corners that my candlelight was too weak to penetrate. It was a lesson we all learned early: you don’t want to catch the eye of something that you can’t see. It was tempting, though. The silence was roaring in my ears, and beneath it, I was almost convinced that there was something rustling, too quietly to hear properly.

Keeping my back firmly to the wall, I edged towards the bed. As I moved closer, I realised there were two wooden bedside tables on either side, each with a lamp, and in my relief, I hurried towards them.

It was a rookie error. As soon as my back was unprotected, I felt something cold rush behind me. Not a thing, precisely, more of a wind; it was like standing just outside of the path of a powerful air conditioner. Still, it gave me a jump, and I whirled around, losing track of my candlelight, which promptly winked out, leaving me in the dark again.

“ _Idiot_ ,” I said, with feeling. I waited for a second, heart pounding, for something to happen. When it didn’t, I dove for the light.

I felt better right away when both the lamps were on. Light was never a guarantee of safety, and I knew better than to relax too much, but the room felt much less ominous without so many shadows in it, and I started to feel embarrassed about being so easily spooked. Of course it hadn't been a mal; they didn't waste time sneaking around behind your back when they could go straight for you. It must have been a draft. Lucky the others weren't around – that would be hard won cred, down the drain.

Thinking about the others sobered me up instantly. 

"Pull yourself together, Galadriel," I muttered to myself. "You need to get out of here."

Methodically, I swept the room, first in the normal sense to check there were no nasty surprises waiting for me, and then slower, with the mirror, to see if there was a way out that I was missing.

It wasn't just any room, I realised. It was a senior dorm, exactly the same shape and size as mine was. Everything in it was different, though. It wasn't just the bed, it was the old-fashioned bureau where the shelves were in my room, with lots of little drawers that were disconcertingly locked. Then there was a moth-eaten chaise lounge at the foot of the bed, upholstered in what must once have been luxurious red velvet, and a literal woven tapestry hanging over the entire far wall. The occupant of the room clearly had no sense at all.

There was no other way out. That would clearly be too easy.

But there _was_ an occupant, or at least there had been once. I found her things in the top drawer of one of the little bedside tables. Well, one thing, really: a diary.

I didn't have any compunctions about reading it, because it was clear that the occupant of the room was long gone. By then, I had two theories. The first was that we'd fallen through a timeslip – unusual, but not unheard of, at least in the real world. It was impossible to truly travel back in time, though not for a lack of maleficers trying, but the closest you could get was a sort of astral projection. In other words, your soul travelled back without the rest of you. Eventually you'd ping back like an elastic band stretched too far; you just had to hope that nothing had taken up residence in your body in the meantime.

The second theory was that she just had a taste for fancy furniture and poor sense, and had therefore been eaten. 

The diary made me lean towards the former, though it turned out to be not much of a diary at all, more more of a collection of notes than anything else. The paper was thin and fragile and clearly very old – I had to be careful while leafing through the pages – and the spine was engraved: it read _Genevieve Heath_. 

None of the notes appeared to be particularly useful, at least until I got to a page about a quarter of the way titled CONSTITUENT PARTS OF THE SCHOLOMANCE and underlined neatly.

This was the first thing I’d seen so far that in any way related to the reason we were supposedly here, and it was about time too. But whatever Genevieve had been making notes from, she hadn’t bothered to explain; it was just a collection of random bullet points, that said things like:

_Ambient magic – where does energy go? CLOSED LOOP._

and 

_Accumulation a byproduct of a collection of magical signatures = hugely persuadable, powerful force_

and 

_Mirrorspace a potential shortcut, mimicking properties of the void, though try getting THAT past the academy_

and

_Is force the key element WRT construction? What defines impenetrability – has to be something no mal has – it’s about logic, not magic._

Helpful. 

Most of the rest of the book was indecipherable. It was written in a language I didn't know, had never even seen before. As I flicked through, I felt that chill again, and – did I really hear it, or was it still in my head? – heard the singing from the atrium. Somehow, I knew that it was in the same language as whatever it was I was reading, and suddenly I realised that I _was_ familiar with it. I just didn’t know where from.

That was roughly the point at which my bullshit tolerance expired. My priorities flipped from “pass history” to “get the fuck out, right now.” But unless there was something obvious that I was missing, and I didn’t think there was, the only way I could think to do it was to accumulate enough mana to blast a hole in the wall.

Frustrated, I tossed the book to the side and opened the second drawer in the table. There was just a mass of wool and some knitting needles. 

I stared at it, then looked back at the book. It had flipped open to a page near the start which just read, ominously, _The Scholomance is a reflection. It_ _listens. _

Well, if it was listening. 

I took a deep breath, then got up and walked forwards.

"If you don't let me out _right the fuck now_ ," I said conversationally to the air. "I swear to God, I don't care how much mana it takes, I am going to take you apart brick by brick. And until then I'll – I'll scratch swear words into the walls, I'll break all the light bulbs, I'll tear up all the sheets, and when I'm done with you, there won't be a single stone standing. And then there won't be any point to you. You won't exist."

I broke off, and waited. Nothing happened, but the air felt like it had changed, somehow, or maybe I had. I stood in the middle of the room, fists clenched, for a long moment, and then relaxed.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said, and stalked back to the side table. Push-ups would be more fun, but knitting was more work, and therefore more effective. I was beginning to theorise that the widely accepted notion that mana was the product of equivalent effort directed elsewhere was wrong. By now, I figured it was actually just about suffering.

Mum had taught me; naturally she was brilliant at it. My wardrobe at home was filled with jumpers she’d knitted me, and they were all soft and warm and made me feel like I was getting a hug. I’d brought one with me, but I only put it on when things were really dire. She said that I should be better at it than I was, because it was all about being methodical. That I wanted to skip ahead too much. _One stitch at a time, my darling_ , she said. _It’ll take you where you need to go_.

I took a breath, and thought about it. Why was I there? Because of arcane history. To learn something hidden, or unknown, about the school. And during that process, we'd fallen through a timeslip. Or had we? Was it true that we'd fallen, when we'd chosen to go ourselves? 

We were supposed to be here to learn something about the Scholomance. It wasn't its style to trap us in here for no apparent reason; if it wanted us gone, all it had to do was let in the mals. 

I came to the end of the row I was working on. A closed loop, the diary had said. Well, I knew that. Magic was energy and energy came from somewhere. There was nothing outside that cycle; everything just got used and reused and used again. 

And the Scholomance was magic, too. It was made up of real materials, but it was magic that stuck it all together. Centuries of students casting magic of all kinds within its walls had only reinforced that. It was like the diary said: the Scholomance reflected what you showed it. It didn't let anything out. There was nowhere for any of it to go, anyway, except for the graduation gates, or –

The void. 

I looked up at the tapestry against the far wall. It moved slightly to some wind I couldn’t sense.

I’d checked behind it when I’d first got there, of course, but I hadn’t looked in my mirror. A stupid oversight; sure enough, when I did, there was the void, implacably, familiarly black as it was in my own room. It was the one part of the room that was exactly the same.

I put my hand against it, tentatively. If I pushed, my hand disappeared through the wall. I left it there for a second, long enough for it to start to get cold, then pulled it back out.

I'd never been idiotic enough to try venturing out. I knew others had. Some of them had even made it back. If this was _our_ void, I probably wouldn't.

But the only logical conclusion was that it wasn't our void. It still might be dangerous, and it certainly looked like it was ours, but the fact remained: we had travelled somewhere else. The Scholomance was trying to teach us something about itself. 

I hurried back to the bed and shoved my knitting and the two books into my bag, before returning, squaring my shoulders.

Tentatively, I put a foot out into the black. It resisted, as though it were a thin sheet of rubber. I pushed on, until I knew I'd reached the point where it would snap, or send me back. 

Then, with a popping sensation in my ears, I was gone. 

* * *

When I opened my eyes, I was looking right back at me.

I stumbled over nothing, disoriented, and span round for a few seconds, before realising I was in the girls’ bathrooms – sort of.

The girls’ bathrooms that I knew were pretty functional: an L shape, divided into showers and cubicles, with rows of sinks and changing areas in between. They were permanently damp and mildly grimy and wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban leisure centre, which made them the most mundane part of the whole Scholomance.

These bathrooms were not mundane. 

Obviously, you expected a bathroom to have mirrors. Generally there were a few over the sinks and perhaps a full-length one against the back of the door. But there was such a thing as too much, and I was standing in it.

“I think this is overkill,” I informed the air. _All_ the walls were mirrored, reflecting countless unimpressed versions of myself back at me. And it wasn’t just the walls; it was the floors, the ceiling. Any possible surface. The fittings all looked the same – though who wanted to shower with six versions of yourself staring at you, I didn’t know – but it made the room different. Unfamiliar, in a different way than Genevieve’s bedroom had been. It was like no place I had ever been in before.

Case in point: the door wasn’t where I thought it would be. I turned around, confused, and made my way into the other arm of the L, where the cubicles were, but when I turned the corner, there was just another corner. Which definitely shouldn’t have been there.

This was the trouble with mirror magic: it warped things, made them different than they appeared. I rounded the corner with trepidation, and saw a row of sinks with relief, but when I walked forwards, I bumped into a glass wall.

“ _S_ _hit_ ,” I said, and swerved, turning to my left instead. My shoes clicked against the glass as I walked, but other than that, it was dead silent, not even a dripping tap. It was eerie.

Still, somehow, I didn’t notice when the singing started up again. It felt internal, a song stuck in my head on some subconscious level I wasn’t paying attention to, until a switch tripped and I suddenly realised it was there. Then, it intensified, echoed, the same girl singing determinedly on. I whipped my head around, looking for the source, but was disoriented again by my own reflection. There were too many corners, too much white reflection. I couldn’t make anything out.

I didn’t much like seeing myself stumble around like that. “Get a fucking grip, Galadriel,” I said, but I could hear an unsure note in my own voice. I steeled myself, and said, steadily, “I am getting out of here.”

It was hard to exit in a dignified fashion when I kept bumping into walls. I imagined Orion in this room, like a bull in a china shop, and grinned. Aadhya would have said something insightful about the mirrors, and why they were like that. Liu would say – 

“Check your mirror, El,” I said, out loud, over the sound of the singing, and fumbled with my bag. “You idiot.”

I lifted the mirror halfway up, before hesitating. You didn’t usually put two mirrors in front of each other; it was dangerous. It created a feedback loop that could easily corrupt itself, and corrupted magic never meant anything good. But then again, I was already in the middle of mirrors all pointing at each other. It was just another reason why I needed to get out of there.

Slowly, I made my way forwards, walking with caution to avoid banging into any more walls. The freezing spell wasn’t intended to be permanent – it would have used up a lot more mana if it had been – but it was holding pretty well. I wondered if it had broken on any of the others’ mirrors, and what the curse was saying to them if so. I wondered if they were trapped somewhere else in the Scholomance – or the Mirrormance, I supposed would be more accurate. I wondered if they were alright.

I reached a dead end, and turned back around. I was counting on there being an exit somewhere, hidden. I didn’t know what I’d do if there wasn’t. Probably go back to my original plan of blowing stuff up until I could blast my way out. 

Suddenly, something changed. I couldn’t tell what it was, and retraced a few paces in case I’d seen something in the mirror that I hadn’t consciously clocked. It took a second to realise that it was the singing, or more accurately, something below the singing. Something scraping, like it was being dragged along.

A flicker of movement caught my eye in the mirror opposite me, and I looked up.

It was the spiritsucker. I’d never seen one in person, but there was no mistaking those stingers. It was hard to compute – mals sometimes are, the human mind being unwilling to comprehend that level of grotesquery – but it was moving towards me, and fast. 

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” I said, and broke into a run. I didn’t want to cast any spells in there – there was no telling how they might rebound. I abandoned all my concerns about how idiotic I looked, and raced forwards, checking my own mirror intermittently, more out of desperation than anything else.

By then, I was well and truly lost. It wasn’t that the bathroom felt all that much bigger than the one I was familiar with; at least, the echoes didn’t sound like it could be. But the mirrors made it impossible to know where I was going. I felt a rising sense of panicked claustrophobia in my chest.

I stumbled into a wall, and looked over my shoulder, but when I looked back, the spiritsucker was in front of me. I screamed and it paused for a second, like a flinch, before beetling closer with that awful scraping sound. I backed away, afraid to take my eyes off it, holding my mirror in front of me. The singing was rising in pitch, a choral symphony of echoes loud enough to deafen.

The mirror seemed to confuse it, and it hesitated again. I took the opportunity to turn and sprint, at least as far as I could before I ran into another corner. I banged my shoulder on it, hard, and swore as I staggered forwards, looking back into the mirror.

I was distracted enough by the pain and by trying not to be eaten that I almost missed it. In the reflection of the mirror in front of me, there were words, daubed red and wet onto the glass: _THROUGH HERE_.

I stopped for a split second and stared, before the scraping started to come too close for comfort. I didn’t dare look behind me to see how close the mal was. There was no real time to second guess it: I threw myself at the glass, and hoped for the best.

* * *

I could tell I was in the library by the smell, even before I opened my eyes to find myself in one of the minor stacks I’d never been down, signposted MAGICAL CRYPTOGRAPHY AND CRYPTANALYSIS. It was just the same: sort of musty, a bit damp. The hush was the same, too, and I felt lightheaded with relief that the mal hadn’t followed me through, let alone the disembodied X Factor wannabe. For a second, I hoped that I’d made it back through to the Scholomance I usually lived in. At least there I understood how it was trying to kill me.

Still, I was starting to piece together some of it. There were doors; I just needed my mirror to see them. Presumably one of those doors would eventually lead to a way out.

"They'd better," I muttered, casting a beady eye around. This room was more recognisable; I was unsurprised that it hadn't changed in over two hundred years. 

I picked a book off the shelf at random and flipped it open. There was just handwriting, lines and lines of it, and I stared for a second, before realising that I was reading some freshman's notes from their Intro to Maleficaria lecture. I closed the book and looked at the spine. It read, simply, _EMMANUEL ADEDAYO_. 

It was exactly the same as Genevieve’s book, and I began to realise what I was looking at. In fact, as I walked through the aisle, all the books were like that. There were no spellbooks, none of the dusty bound PhDs that dotted the shelves in the library I knew. It was a living register, a library not of magic but of its students. Every student who had ever been admitted to the Scholomance. 

Some of the books were shorter than others – there were a few there that actually had multiple volumes. Slowly, I began to realise the implications. There must be one for my mum, for my friends. For my dad. For me. 

Before I could go too far down that rabbit hole, though, there was a crash from a few aisles over, making me jump right out of my skin, and then someone swore in guilty tones. 

_Familiar_ guilty tones.

Despite everything I had in me, I couldn’t stop myself from closing my eyes for a second, awash with some mortifying emotion I refused to acknowledge. I shoved the book I was holding back on its shelf and hurried around the corner, then composed myself.

“I could tell by the noise it was you,” I began, strolling into the aisle where Orion Lake was placing a large wooden globe back onto its desk, looking shifty. “Wherever there is chaos and disaster, there too goes Orion –”

“El,” he said, face clearing, and in two strides he was in front of me. He looked like he was going to hug me, but must have thought better of it, though momentum had compelled him far enough that he had to hold himself back, clumsily. I rolled my eyes, but in a way I knew how he felt; we’d been through enough that it felt like a real reunion, deserving of ceremony. Awkwardly, I offered him my hand to shake.

He shook it, solemn, then neither of us knew what to say for a second, before we both spoke together.

“Boy, am I glad to see you –”

"Have you noticed the books –"

He laughed. I carried on. "I've just been looking at them. They aren't spellbooks."

"Well, this one is," said Orion, and offered me a book. "I found it on this desk, just before you got here and the stupid globe fell over."

I took it from him and flipped it open. It was in the same strange language as the writing in Genevieve's book. "Huh."

"This is really weird," Orion said. "Everything is off. I feel like I'm being followed around. I thought this was a _history class_."

"I know," I said. "I don't get it either. And the spiritsucker Aadhya was talking about – it got in here somehow."

"Yeah," he said, and rubbed his jaw. "It was in the room with me when I went through the door."

I fell silent, and eyed him. He obviously hadn't been eaten, so that was fine. But it had been my idea to go through the door, and when Orion fought mals, they didn't tend to both walk away; it must have taken something out of him. There was a long scratch down one of his cheeks, and his t-shirt was torn. He still wasn’t wearing any socks, though that was more of a personality flaw than evidence of trauma. 

"I dropped your mirror," he said. "In the fight. Sorry."

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, the words feeling weird in my mouth. He frowned at me, and I rallied myself. “Well, how’d you get out without one?”

His face cleared and he smiled sheepishly. “Exploded the wall.”

“Typical,” I said. “You couldn’t have exploded the mal, too?”

“I tried,” he said, the smile dropping off his face. “Wasn’t fast enough. I really need to kill it, El.”

“Well, it would be nice if you did, I’m sure,” I said. “I mean, you seem more emotionally invested in it than is healthy, but I’ve known you’re an obsessive weirdo for a while, so –”

“No, look,” he said, and waved his wrist at me. 

“What? Stop moving,” I said, and grabbed it, turning it over to look at his power sharer. It looked dull, somehow, faded from its usual colour.

“I can’t make it work here,” he told me. “And I killed that mal this morning, so I’m not totally out, but… I don’t have many more wall explosions in me.”

I stared at him for a second. It was somewhat unsettling to think of Orion as – what, helpless? It had been the subject of more than one petty daydream after the first time he’d saved my life: _El, I’m powerless, save me from the big bad mal_ , he’d say, and I’d say, magnanimous, _well, fine, Lake, I suppose I might miraculously come to your rescue, so long as it doesn’t interrupt my busy schedule and you tell everyone you know about it after_ , so on and so forth. But much as I didn’t need him, I didn’t want him to need _me_ , to rely on me. I wasn’t used to that, and I wasn’t sure I’d come through the other side of it unimpeachably.

“I think we need to get out of here,” I decided, and Orion nodded, fervently enough that his hair flopped over his eyes. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen the others?”

“No,” he said. “First I was in an alchemy lab, only – it wasn’t. Then I was pretty busy fighting the mal, and when I came through the other side of the wall, I was here. The hole sealed up before it could get through, I guess. I’ve been walking around here for half an hour, maybe. I’m really glad to see you.”

I frowned. “That can’t be right. I must have been in the first room for at least an hour.”

He shrugged. “Well, neither of us have watches,” he said, reasonably. “Maybe we guessed wrong.”

“No, that’s not it,” I said, my mind racing. “There’s something weird going on here. Maybe it’s because of the mirrors – but then, what’s the singing? And how does any of this relate to arcane history?”

“It doesn’t,” said Orion. “It’s probably a curse, or something. A trap.”

I snorted. “Right, because we’re so important,” I said. “This took real magic to make, whatever it is. Real thought. I know everyone’s obsessed with you, but they’re not _that_ obsessed.” I took a look at his face and backtracked. “Or, let’s be honest, that good. And I don’t know that this is a trap. There are doors, even if they aren't obvious. Clues."

“Well, what is it, then?” he said. 

I looked around. Behind Orion, the globe span lazily on its axis. Every few seconds, a pinprick of light flared in a different spot. I’d read about it before; a geolocation spell, created to triangulate new magical signatures. It was how the Scholomance found its students. “It’s more like – a memory,” I said.

“Okay,” said Orion, sounding unconvinced. I shook myself out of it.

“Let’s go,” I said, and waved my mirror at him. “We’ll do this the easy way. No explosions necessary.”

* * *

The library was just as big as our one, and it took us forever to find the door, though luckily the mal didn’t show up to make the experience even worse. Eventually, Orion spotted a shelf that seemed slightly out of joint with the others, and after a little manoeuvring we realised it was a false bookcase, which pulled away from the wall to reveal – well, a wall, but of course, that wasn’t all it was.

We emerged into a lecture hall, though it wasn't at all like the kind of lecture hall I was familiar with from Maleficaria Studies. It was more of a theatre, in fact, with soft carpeted floors and plush red seats in front of long curving desks, and a raised podium at the front like a stage. There were even two levels; Orion and I were on a sort of mezzanine. I wandered down the steps to the smart railing that separated it from the ground floor, where – 

"Hang on, isn't that -"

"Aadhya!" I shouted. "Liu!"

They were hurrying down the left aisle towards the front, looking nervously behind them. Orion leaned over the railing and waved. “Up here!”

I elbowed him. “Are they being _chased_?”

“By what?” he said, still waving, before blinking and looking at me. “Oh. The mal?”

By then, they’d seen us. “How’d you get up there?” Aadhya called up.

“There’s a door – are you okay?”

“Near escape,” Liu said. “We just trapped the spiritsucker in the workshop – I don’t know how long it’ll stay there, though.”

“Look,” Orion said, and pointed at a little spiral staircase, which we duly clattered down. It was odd to all be standing together again, though it had only been a few hours – at least, a few hours for me. It might only have been five minutes for Aadhya or Liu, for all I knew. 

Despite the fact that we had plenty to catch up on, we stood around for a second not quite knowing what to say. 

“How’d you get away from the mal?” I said eventually. 

“Liu,” said Aadhya. “She was brilliant. We’d just found each other in the workshop when it showed up, and she did this trick that made it back right off, and then we ran for the door. Good thing you thought about the mirrors, El, we’d be stuck without them.”

Orion looked sheepish. I said, “I’m beginning to wonder if I did think of it, or if it was put into my mind. Listen – where the fuck _are_ we?”

“I was hoping you’d know,” Aadhya said. “We were just saying – we’ve never heard of anything like this.”

“If it wasn’t for the mal, I wouldn’t mind hanging out here a bit longer and figuring it out,” said Liu. “It’s like being inside a puzzle box. I mean – look what I found.”

She pulled something out of her pocket, and I took it from her. It was a fine, wide comb, made of what looked like ivory. I turned it over and ran my thumb over the letters etched into the back.

“It’s a key,” I said, slowly. 

“To a door?” said Orion, looking skeptical. “Like a door out of here?”

“Not that sort of key,” I said, and looked up. Something in the back of my mind had just clunked into place.

Before I could figure out exactly what it was, though, the room dimmed, ominously.

“Speaking of doors,” Aadhya said. “Maybe we’d better go find one.”

On cue, a repetitive, metallic sound began to echo through the room, like a crank. I turned around to see a screen descending from the ceiling in front of the seats. As I watched, a light flickered on, beaming from the back of the mezzanine. I craned my neck back around, shading my eyes to try and see where it was coming from, but by then, the rest of the room was almost totally in shadow. 

It looked like an old-fashioned projector. As we watched, a screen slid into view. It read:

DOORS WILL OPEN IN 30 MINUTES

PLEASE TAKE A SEAT FOR THE RECORDING

I turned back towards the others. “Well, that seems pointed.”

Aadhya said, “Fine by me. Maybe it’ll explain what’s going on.”

One by one, we took a seat – except Orion, who was left standing. “What?” I said.

“What about the mal?” he said. “Liu’s right. It might get in any time. And we’ll just be sitting ducks.”

“Well, we can’t see to find a way out,” I said. “Not in the dark.”

“Aadhya has her ring,” he persisted. 

“I don’t think we’ll have any luck,” Liu said, gently. “There seems to be a logic in how this version of the Scholomance operates. It wants to show us something; I doubt it’ll let us leave until it does. Don’t worry, Orion, we can deal with the mal if we need to.”

There was a troubled furrow in his brow. I knew what he was thinking. “We’re perfectly capable of managing,” I said snippily. “Even without you. Preposterous as you might find that.”

“Are you?” he had the audacity to reply, gravely.

“Oh, God, Orion, you can take a mirror and go looking yourself if you want to,” I said. “Only don’t be such an _idiot._ It won’t kill you to sit down for half an hour.”

Still looking troubled, he wavered for a long moment, before nodding jerkily and flinging himself into the seat next to Liu. I nodded, satisfied, and pulled out my knitting. I might as well top up my crystal, as much as I could; I meant what I’d told Orion, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared.

After a 30-second countdown, the video started. It was very, very old, and silent at first, though there was a funny sort of crackling sound that I supposed was the machinery. Then after a few frames ticked by, a faded-sounding gramophone started playing some jazzy plinking piano music. It appeared to be a flickering black-and-white symposium of Scholomance students, presenting their senior projects to an audience of enclavers. There were intertitles describing the nature of each project: "A SPELL TO RAISE A TREE FROM STONE, BY ANNELIESE SCHNEIDER", or "THE USES OF DRAGON ASH IN WARD CONSTRUCTION, BY LEÓN RODRIGUEZ ", that sort of thing. They still held the symposium every year, though it meant less nowadays, when most enclave invitations were handed out pre-graduation. 

Liu was riveted. Orion was watching with his legs sprawled in front of him and his head resting on one wrist – he might have been sleeping, actually. Aadhya wasn't paying attention at all.

"What's wrong with Orion?" she whispered to me.

"So many things," I said, distracted. "What do you mean?"

"He's acting weird," she said. 

"He _is_ weird," I said, tearing myself away from the girl onscreen demoing a magic harpsichord and turning to look at her. "Why are you asking?"

She shrugged. "You know him best. I mean, you're his best friend."

" _What?_ ” I said, forgetting to be quiet. Liu said, "Shh!"

Aadhya rolled her eyes at me. "Obviously, El. It's not exactly Chloe or Magnus, is it."

I would have to think about that. I set it aside in a corner of my mind to mull over, and returned to her question. "His power sharer isn't working," I said. "And I think he's having an existential crisis."

"Oh," said Aadhya. "Standard."

"Yep," I said. On screen, a girl was placing what looked like a sort of doll house on the stage. The enclavers appeared unimpressed. 

"I can see why he was worried about the mal," Aadhya said. "But he should know you'd be able to handle it, even if he doesn't rate Liu and me. You took out a _mawmouth_."

"He doesn't know that," I pointed out. 

"You haven't told him?" she said. 

"Like he'd believe me if I did," I said. "Hang on, shut up, I think this is it."

The intertitle read: RECONSTRUCTION OF THE SCHOLOMANCE USING MIRRORSPACE, BY GENEVIEVE HEATH. It was up for a long second before it cut back to the girl. She was tall and had two long, stringy braids hanging behind her back like bell pulls. She wore glasses and her hands were clenched into nervous fists by her side. 

There were no subtitles, so we had to guess what was going on. I looked at the faces of the enclavers: first mildly bored, they started to sit up as she spoke, pay attention. She waved a hand over the doll’s house, opening it a panel at a time: there was a library, a bedroom with drapes on the walls, a little mirrored bathroom. 

I was keeping an ear out for it, so I noticed when the music began to change: first it distorted every now and then as though the needle on the gramophone was skipping, and then the distortions seemed to expand in duration, til the music was overrun with that crackling white noise, which slowly, slowly began to resolve itself into that familiar unfamiliar spell.

Only this time I had an idea what it meant. I stuffed my knitting back into my bag.

“Can you hear that?” Aadhya said, sounding grim.

“Yep,” I said, and looked back down at the comb Liu had found. I pulled out the spellbook I’d found in Genevieve’s room and opened it to the first page. I couldn’t understand what it said, but I could _feel_ that it was the same as the spell that was now filling the room, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. 

“It’s a _key_ ,” said Liu. “Of _course_.”

“It’ll take us years to translate, though,” I said. 

“No, it won’t,” said Aadhya suddenly. I turned to look at her. “In the first room I was in – there was a spell. I didn’t understand what it was for at first, but…”

“Okay,” I said. “Go for it.”

She muttered something under her breath, and suddenly, the spell started to make sense. _Brick by brick by brick, stone and cement and wood and iron, a roof to shelter –_

“It’s the spell that raised the Scholomance,” said Liu. “Oh my _god_. That’s not on the blueprints.”

“This is huge,” Aadhya said blankly. “Hang on – who’s got a pencil?”

I waved the spellbook at her, feeling a hysterical bubble of astonishment rise in my chest. Aadhya was right; it was huge. This was as good as the Sutras. 

“Well, now we know,” Orion said, rudely interrupting my fantasies of turning down letters from the heads of every enclave across the globe. “Can we leave?”

“I know it doesn’t mean much to you,” I said. “But this doesn’t just happen – I mean, everyone is going to want this spell.”

But despite myself, the bubble had popped. Something had rung false in what I’d just said, and I wasn’t sure why. “It doesn’t just happen,” I repeated.

Why had the Scholomance brought us here for this? It was an incredibly valuable spell. If it had given me the Sutras to distract me from the mawmouth, then…

I looked up at the screen, as Genevieve’s presentation came to an end. Rows and rows of enclaves got to their feet, in their suits and robes and eyeglasses, applauding. She looked out over them, detached, but I thought that I could see her hands relaxing. 

Then she looked at us. 

Not at the camera, at _us_. I sat frozen, caught in her gaze. Deliberately and exaggeratedly, she mouthed, "Behind you."

The screen went blank, and something scraped, right next to my ear. I screamed and jumped to my feet, spinning around; sure enough, the spiritsucker was there, inches away. I backed away, and Aadhya flung a propelling spell at it, driving it back a few feet. Dimly, I registered the clanking sound of the screen being wound back up. 

Liu raised a wall of protective fire, and Orion – 

“Don’t be an idiot,” I snarled, lunging for him as he tried to dive headfirst out of Liu’s shield. “You haven’t got enough mana, be sensible for once in your life –”

“Yes, and if I kill it, I’ll _get_ mana –”

“Not if it kills you first –” 

“ _Can you two stop bickering for two seconds so we can get the fuck out of here_ ,” Aadhya cried. She’d jumped up onto the podium, holding her mirror loosely in her hand. I looked up at her, then behind her, where the screen had fully retracted to reveal a black wall. She tilted her head towards it. “Through there – come _on_.”

I grabbed Orion’s wrist and hauled him bodily towards the wall, with Liu bringing up the rear, maintaining her shield for as long as she could. Just visible beyond it, I could see the spiritsucker. I swallowed, and turned away, and we went through the door.

* * *

I hadn’t really been paying much attention to the interior design of the graduation hall the last time I’d been there, admittedly. But the room we were in was different, as all the others had been. I'd thought of it as a rugby stadium before, but rugby stadiums tended to be floodlit; this room was much darker, the walls stretching so far that the ceiling was shadowed, its corners obscure. It was cold enough that my breath came out in white clouds, and it was utterly, completely silent.

We were smack in the middle of the hall, directly between the gates and the machinery – not patched up, as I'd last seen it, but gleaming, brand new, as it must've been a hundred years ago, when Genevieve had presumably been at the school. 

I turned and jumped; there was a chayena right behind me, slavering and poised on its haunches, ready to spring for my throat. I leapt back and started casting an incineration spell, more powerful than it really deserved, before Aadhya grabbed my arm. 

"El – no, stop," she said. "Look at it. It's not real."

I glanced at her, uncomprehending, before looking back at it. She was right; it was frozen in place, the dull malevolent gleam in its eyes sort of fixed. It wasn't real.

"Is it a statue?" said Liu.

"It's made of wax," said Aadhya. "It's a waxworks."

I looked at the gates, where Patience and Fortitude lurked. I wasn't a bit surprised to learn that they'd been around for a century. They looked smaller, and had slightly fewer tendrils. Still, though, I suppressed a shudder, looking at them. 

"We'd better get the fuck out of here," I said. "Before the spiritsucker gets here."

"Or before they decide to wake up," muttered Orion, voicing exactly the thought I was trying my best not to think. 

"You think the gates will take us home?" Aadhya said. 

"I guess it makes sense," said Liu. "We got in through the doors and we're leaving via the graduation gates. Only – hm."

"What?" I said.

"Well, if this is all based on her experience here – what's her name?"

"Genevieve," I said. 

"How is it still here? In the Scholomance? We haven't _left_ , not physically."

"Well, she clearly had a vivid imagination," I said, scowling at a wax model of a sirenspider, pincers and all. 

"Maybe she didn't leave," said Aadhya, disquietingly. "Maybe she died before getting out of here.”

Her voice rang out strangely in the quiet, and I shuddered. I was starting to lose the feeling in my feet, I didn’t like it there, and I’d had enough. “I think that’s our cue to leave.”

“Agreed,” Orion said, looking on edge. 

But before we could, the spiritsucker materialised, because of course it did. 

The spiritsucker scraped against the floor as it moved, because its claws dragged on the floor, as though it wasn’t dangerous enough with all the stingers, or the mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. Or the sheer aura it emanated, which made me want to die. 

But aside from all of that, even aside from the unsettling soul-eating stuff, you didn’t particularly want to run into a spiritsucker, because unlike a lot of other mals, which just killed you in disgusting ways, they had a modicum of their own malia, which they could use to exercise a bad influence on things around them. And we were in a world made of mirrors, which might just reflect its magic back, double it. Make it more powerful. 

Suddenly I understood how it had gotten through the walls, but I had bigger things to worry about.

With an alarming creak, Patience lifted its head. The sirenspider near me unstuck one pincer and then another from its web. I looked around, and the mals were all shaking themselves alert, turning to look at us, one by one.

We were in the middle of the graduation horde. And it was waking up.

We had maybe a minute or so before they would attack. “Right,” Aadhya said briskly. “I think I know a spell to tackle the waxworks – but it’ll take a few minutes.”

“I can keep them off you,” Liu said. Aadhya nodded, and began casting with no further ado, launching into a spell in a lilting singsong of a language I didn’t know. Liu stepped back and raised her wall of fire around her, looking grim.

“Give me your crystal,” Orion said to me. “Let me kill the spiritsucker, and then I’ll transfer you back the mana.”

“No way,” I said, automatically. “Absolutely not. I’ll kill the spiritsucker.”

“Come _on_ , El,” he said, frustrated. 

“I can do it,” I said. And I could; I had a dozen spells at my fingertips. I'd taken down the mawmouth. "I know you don't think I can, but –"

"It's not about that," he said. "I'll just do it faster." 

And that was Orion all over; honest and clumsily cruel with it, without meaning to be. Because he was right, he would. I would need to be careful to not accidentally kill my friends, and it would slow me down. Orion had the experience of killing a thousand mals. And more: it went against his nature, sitting on the sidelines.

Whereas I was used to it.

"We can both take the rest of them, after," he said. "Come on, El, please."

I could do it, and prove myself. (Only Aadhya and Liu already knew what I could do, and I didn’t care what Orion thought.) I could do it, because it’d be easier. Because I didn’t want to give up my hard-earned mana, my mum’s crystal. Because Orion could handle sitting one out, just one time.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said, and yanked it over my head. “If you don’t return this to me in absolutely pristine condition, I will feed you to a mawmouth myself.”

“Thank you,” he said, too earnestly, and took it. I scowled and turned away, accidentally catching Liu’s eye. She raised her eyebrows at me. I shrugged.

In the end, for all that it had menaced us through the whole Mirrormance, Orion made fairly short work of the spiritsucker. By then, the wax mals had woken up enough to decide we might make a tasty breakfast, so I distracted myself by keeping some of the chayenas away from him. They were easier to kill than the regular kind, thank god; I smashed my mirror on the floor and used the sharp edge to slice right through them, and they just crumpled to the ground.

When the spiritsucker died, there was a strange ripple through the whole room, like a shockwave. I turned away from the last chayena and Orion was standing over it, tall and brimming over, somehow, like all the hair on his head was standing on end, or like he was standing in the kind of sunlight I hadn’t seen in three years.

He grinned at me, and I tried not to flinch at how strange his face looked. Then he walked over, unlooping the crystal from around his wrist.

“In the crystal,” I warned, backing away, and he laughed, before coming close and gently dropping it over my head. He put his hand, warm and big, over the top of my sternum, where the crystal dangled, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the crystal was full again.

We both looked down at it for a split second, then a soul-eater came careening at us, and I pushed his hand away, and both of us to the floor, as he shot a killing spell at it. 

“Right,” I said, aiming to sound businesslike and glancing over at Aadhya, who was still in full flow. Liu was fighting off a grogler, its tentacles going everywhere. “Well, I suppose we’d better take care of as many of these as we can. To help. Or to not die. Either one.”

“Yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I’ll go that way.”

Even if these mals were easier to kill than your standard garden variety, there were still enough of them that soon I had to be fully focused on what I was doing, just to stave off the horde. I also didn’t want to use up too much of my mana; it would take me longer than Orion to replenish it. 

The jagged mirror was an unexpected aid. I knew a swordsmanship spell from Napoleonic France – not that I’d ever had cause to use it, but it had appeared for me once when I was trying to get a spell to conjure up cutlery – and casting it helped me wield it considerably better, letting me keep my other hand free for killing spells. I’d so rarely had the chance to just turn off my mind and let myself go, before, but everything was moving so quickly that I didn’t have much choice. And it was easy.

When I looked up again, I was near the gates. Orion was a few feet away, battling Fortitude – at least I thought it was Fortitude. I froze for a second, remembering the mawmouth I’d faced down back in our Scholomance, the sensation of being consumed, but then one of its limbs curled around Orion’s shin, and Patience lumbered towards them, and I propelled myself forwards.

The worst thing about real mawmouths was the inescapable sense of how organic they were: of being pushed up against and into something red and pulsing and wet and rotting, The wax ones weren’t like that, exactly, but they still had far more limbs and mouths than I was comfortable with, and maybe it was just that these were younger, but they were faster. It was all Orion and I could do to keep the two of them away from us.

“You have to go sort of _in it_ ,” I gasped, in between fending off limbs. “But I don’t recommend it. We can hold it off til Aadhya does whatever she’s doing. I hope.”

He looked at me in surprise. “You’ve fought one?” A beat. “Hold on – the one that Todd –”

“Focus, Lake,” I snarled, and chopped off a tendril with a little mouth on it that was going for his head. 

“Oh, right, sorry,” he said, and turned back to it. But the moment of inattention had cost us, or maybe we were getting tired, or the mawmouths were gathering steam, because they started to beat us back, until we were pressed together with our backs against the gates. I could feel that horrible invasion begin, and I realised I’d been wrong; it was just as bad as the real sort, just different, gluey and stifling. Only the shield I’d hastily thrown up remained between us.

“There’s no room,” Orion said. He cast a stabbing spell, then an incineration, then a strangling spell. It had about as much of an impact as waving a feather at it would have done. 

For my part, I was trying valiantly to manoeuvre my mirror around to try and cut our way out enough to gain a little ground. “I’m _aware_.”

“How’d you do it before?”

“Spell would take out the room,” I said, briefly. “Come on…”

“Do it,” said Orion. 

“You’re an insane person,” I said, then let out a noise of frustration as I dropped my mirror. “Fuck!”

“ _Do it_ ,” Orion said. “We’ve all got shields. El, you can kill it.”

“Not like this,” I said. The mawmouth pressed closer. I tried to move as far back as I could, towards the cool door, closed my eyes, and grabbed Orion’s wrist. I’d officially run out of plays.

With impeccable timing, Aadhya came to the end of her spell, and finished casting. 

Another shockwave ran through the room, this time accompanied by a wave of dry heat, like someone had opened a door into the Sahara desert.

That's how it felt to me, at least. To the waxwork mals, it must have felt very different. It was like they'd been put into a furnace; I watched with astonishment as Fortitude's face, or what passed for a face, drooped out of any recognisable features, melting slowly into some unspeakable liquid that calcified on my shoes. 

Suddenly it was quiet again. I looked up from what was left of Fortitude at the others. There was a long beat before I belatedly remembered to let go of Orion's wrist.

"Nice one," Orion said. Aadhya exhaled, looking shaky. Liu was tense, as though she expected something else to come at her. 

"Okay," I said. " _Now_ we can get the fuck out of here."

The gates opened uncomplainingly and I stepped through them, wishing for the first time that it was the real Scholomance I was in, just so I could leave it for real, too. But then we were back. 

We were in the same seminar room we’d left, all that time ago. The others were in their seats, turned towards each other. For a long second, I stared at them, trying to remember their names. 

"Oh, you're back," said the boy without much interest. _Jacob_ , I thought. "Dead end, was it?"

"You have no idea," I said, and stepped back into the world. 

* * *

I skipped the rest of the day to go back to my room and go to bed for the rest of the day. I must have been tired, because I slept so soundly that when I woke up, it was mid-morning the next day. It was a miracle I hadn't been eaten in the night. 

It wasn't worth going to class, not with half the day gone already and no doubt most of the senior class gossiping about Orion Lake's latest grand adventure. I ate a stale Mars bar I'd been saving for emergencies and went to the library instead, which was quiet, and reassuringly filled with spellbooks. I almost felt emotional at seeing my own desk, empty and familiar. 

When I dumped my bag on it, ready to get up close and personal with my Defence worksheet, my books from the day before slid out. I picked up Genevieve's book; seeing her encoded writing sent a shiver down my spine, though for the life of me I couldn't conjure up the sound of that singing voice. 

Abandoning my worksheet, I sat back in my chair, flipping through it. 

Several hours later, I hadn't gotten any further with Defence, but I'd written half my History essay, and I was ravenous. As soon as the cafeteria opened for dinner, I was waiting outside.

It didn't take too long after I'd grabbed my tray of dubious stew before Aadhya and Liu arrived – they'd just had a class on Magical Biology, I remembered. They made a beeline for me.

"Where have you been?" Aadhya demanded. "I thought something might have eaten you. Orion was all set to ram down your door last night, but I told him the consequences would be worse if you were there and asleep than if you were dead and a bunch of mals were lying in wait for their next meal."

"Good," I said. "I was asleep. Then I was in the library – I couldn't be bothered with classes today."

"I slept in too," Liu said. "I only woke up in time for my first seminar because the mice needed feeding."

"Getting trapped in a mirror is exhausting," Aadhya agreed. "Never again."

"I think it would've been fun without the mal," Liu said. "Like being in a video game. I bet there was so much there we didn't find out."

"It wouldn't have let us in if it wasn't for the mal, though," I said. "Orion was right. It _was_ a trap."

"Hang on," Orion said, from behind me. I cursed myself. "What was that?"

"I said it was a trap," I snapped, as he put his tray next to mine. "Don't you ever sit with the New York enclave anymore? They're going to start accusing me of hypnotising you over to the dark side again soon."

"No, no," he said. "It sounded to _me_ like you said _Orion was right_. Do you mind just repeating that again so I can really let it sink in –"

"Oh, fuck off," I said. "Go back to your rich friends."

"No," he said peaceably, and reached over to drop an extra milk carton on my tray. 

"It feels like an awful lot of effort for a trap," Liu said. "If the Scholomance wanted to kill us, it could have just done it when we were asleep."

"I don't think it was _just_ a trap," I allowed. "I've been writing my essay about it."

"About _what?"_ Orion said through a mouthful of cold chips. "We went in, we waited around, we nearly got killed, we came out again. What's to write about?"

"The spell we got isn't nothing," Liu said, fairly. 

“I think you’re right, El,” Aadhya said. “I was thinking about the books in the library. I was looking for mine – anyway. It remembers everyone; that’s not nothing.”

“But it also tried to kill us,” Orion said. “Am I the only person who remembers it trying to kill us?”

“Yeah, it did,” I said. “And it also taught us everything we used to stop it from killing us. It’s vast, it contains multitudes.”

Which was true, but I was forming my own private theory about why the Scholomance was the way it was. I’d always known it was...persuadable. It knew when you felt safe, or when you were scared, and it acted accordingly. There was some truth in what Orion said, that it was inclined towards killing us, and that probably owed something to the hundreds of mals that lived in it and that solely existed to kill us.

But the Scholomance owed its whole existence to teaching us how to survive, and after hundreds of years of students walking through it and sleeping in it and learning magic and making alliances and eating meals and turning in papers and, yes, dying in it, I could imagine that some of that had sunk in. Carved into the walls.

"What happened to Genevieve's book, El?" Aadhya said. I blinked, my reverie broken.

"I've been reading it," I said. "She was a maintenance track kid, you know. She did her project in her spare time; she must not have even slept. She probably didn't know anyone. No wonder she tried to smuggle it out."

I'd been thinking about it all afternoon: the girl with the thin plaits in the graduation hall, her research tucked under her arm. No wonder she hadn't made it. She'd been all alone. Nobody had even looked over their shoulder back at her when she'd died. 

“The Scholomance must have kept it all this time,” Liu said. “I wonder if we’d be able to get back in if we tried.”

“I doubt it,” I said, and not just because I didn’t want to. The Scholomance _had_ kept it, but it had been the spiritsucker that brought it close to the real world. I had a theory about that, too. About mirrors, and spirits, and ghosts, the idea that a spiritsucker might cleave a soul from its body. About a girl in a doll’s house of her own creation; not even a girl anymore, really, just a wisp, watching. Just cold gusts in a bedroom, or letters daubed on a bathroom mirror, or a globe falling off its desk in a hushed library.

“Wonder what the assignment will be next week,” Orion said darkly. “If it’s more mirrors, I’m switching to Runic Incantations.”

“I thought you said history was the only slot that fit,” I said, arch. Orion flushed a guilty red and bent industriously over his chips.

When we were done with dinner, Liu and Aadhya went to the library, and Orion walked me back to my room. Or rather, I walked back to my room, and Orion slouched along with me, keeping a watchful eye out for anything nasty along the way. It seemed an age since we’d done the same thing the previous morning.

“Listen,” he said, when we got to my room. “Er. I’m not being weird, but –”

“Good opening,” I said, mildly wary. 

“Don’t make a big deal out of this,” he warned, and pulled something out of his pocket. “I just wanted to give you this.”

“What?” I said blankly, and he shoved it at me. It was – a pinecone.

“Wow,” I said. “You shouldn’t have.”

“It’s from one of my dad’s pine trees,” he said. “It’s, you know. It’s nothing special, it just – it makes you feel better. Like your mum’s spell.”

“Oh,” I said, and let it lie flat on my palm. He was right: it smelled good, clean and woodsy, like I’d stepped into a shower of fresh, cool air.

“You took out the mawmouth?” he said. It took me a second to realise what he was talking about. “The one that Todd warned us about?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling very tired, suddenly. It didn’t seem worth it to pretend otherwise. “That time you were in the library.”

“El, that’s huge,” he said. I didn’t look at him; he was sounding dangerously sincere. 

“I told you I could,” I said.

“No, I mean – you’re a hero.”

I stared for a second longer at the pinecone in my hand, before closing my hand over it and breathing in. I did feel better. “Pot, kettle, Lake.”

Then I unfolded my hand and offered it back to him. “It’s your dad’s,” I said. “I wouldn’t give you anything my mum gave me.”

“You don’t have to – I have loads,” he said. “And it’s the new year. Or it was, yesterday. I was going to give it to you yesterday, when I came to get that pen from my room. Only Aadhya was there, and then – well, you know.”

At the commune, practically every day was a celebration of something or the other. I didn’t care much about many of them. Mum had worried for a while about whether we should be doing Diwali, but the truth was that I felt too strange about it, like I did about most of the things that were mine and Dad's and not hers, and she could tell. Plus we both knew enough to know that it wasn't just Diwali that Dad's side of the family celebrated, but not enough to do the rest properly. 

If I'd given it any thought, I would have assumed that nobody else bothered here, either. Stupid of me; of course it mattered to some people. I just hadn't expected Orion to be one of them. 

“It’s the new year?”

“I keep count.”

Of course he did. “What, do you notch days in the back of your wardrobe, or something?”

He flushed, which meant yes. “I knew you wouldn’t care.”

I looked at him sideways. A few months ago, I’d have put it down to how much time he had on his hands, being Prince Genius Mal-Killling Boy Wonder. Now, in a flash of insight I instantly resented, I understood that he was looking forward to the day when he’d etch his last mark, lock his door, and be gone.

“Just take it, El,” he said, and I remembered Aadhya saying, _you’re his best friend_. I deliberated for a second before curling my palm back around it and nodding. He nodded gravely back.

But it had reminded me. I heaved over my bag, and dug out the knitting I’d begun in Genevieve’s room. I’d spent a few hours on it yesterday, in the hopes of filling up my crystal a little more. Offering myself more protection, even if it was meagre.

“Here,” I said, ungraciously, and shoved the mass of wool into Orion’s hands. 

“What?” he said, almost dropping it. 

“What do they look like?” I said. “You put them on your feet. Or - no, don’t tell me, you prefer to stoically suffer the cold, you walk around barefoot rending your garments so you can increase your sadness levels by five percent -”

“Socks?” he said. “You made me socks?”

“Well, I was knitting them anyway,” I said, and waved the crystal at him. He looked at it blankly, then back down at his hands.

“Don’t look like that,” I said, beginning to feel alarmed. “They probably won’t fit. And I know they’ve got holes. I’m really bad at knitting.”

“It’s not that,” he said. “It's just – I really needed some new socks.”

“The standard response is ‘thank you’,” I informed him. “I seem to remember you telling me something about your mother teaching you manners.”

He met my eye. “Thank you,” he said, so sincerely that it was my turn to look away.

“Well, happy new year,” I muttered. It didn’t come out as cynically as I’d intended it to, and I cleared my throat. “Try not to die in any mirrors.”

He stared at me. _Gormless_ , I thought, pointedly, at myself. Then he smiled, barely. “Alright, Galadriel. Next year, out there.” 

Which wasn’t what I’d said, not remotely. But I didn’t hate the thought of it, even so.


End file.
